A woman who stole her daughters' inheritance has been handed a prison sentence and ordered to pay back the money.

The woman's mother passed away in 2013. The woman received an inheritance of about £40,000 from her mother's house, while £50,000 was left to her two daughters. The daughters' inheritance was supposed to be held in trust for them until they were 25, with the woman and her father as trustees. Rather than being invested, the money was held in a bank account in the names of the trustees.

The account was emptied in 10 withdrawals between March 2016 and March 2017. In 2018, when one of the daughters wanted to use some of the funds as a deposit on a house, the withdrawals came to light and the police were contacted.

The court was told that the woman had 'recruited and exploited' her father for the purposes of carrying out the fraud. The judge was satisfied that she had instigated the fraud, stating that she had been annoyed that her daughters had received more money than she had, and that she had acted 'in greed and spite'.

She was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Her father, aged 93, received a 12-month sentence, suspended for 18 months. The judge also made confiscation orders of £50,000 against her and £6,000 against her father, ordering that the money confiscated should be paid to the daughters as compensation.